Anyway, I first got involved in Mystery Hunt in 2005, which was the Normalville hunt. I was a freshman, and the dorm I was living in at the time had a huge team working out of the building (the team was Metaphysical Plant). My very first interaction with Hunt was stumbling out of my room on the Friday and immediately, before coffee or shower, getting asked "[nos]! Can you identify this?!" and having some anime screenshot shoved in my face. Which I did, then stumbled off to the shower.

The other key memories I have of that Hunt are a) learning what a didgeridoo is and sounds like, b) being stuck for over 18 hours on the Orange Meta (fuck you, TIE), and c) the fact that Metaphysical Plant won that year and thus had to write the next one.

This is when my history with Hunt gets messy. There was some...drama about who was going to be on the writing team. And I don't remember if I kept the emails about it, but I ended up not being on it for various reasons, some of which were probably amounting to "I'm only a frosh what do I know and could possibly contribute?" (protip to future teams: this is a really shitty thing for your frosh teammates feel. Try to avoid it! And if you find out they are, even if you're totally not meaning for them to, try to fix it.) I also ended up having problems living in that dorm, so when the 2006 Hunt came around, I did not want to hunt with the dorm team. Unfortunately, I was working truly insane front desk shifts that IAP, and people were hunting right in the lounge outside the office door, I was kind of fucked for hunting with any other team. So I didn't.

The following year, the Hell Hunt in 2007, I was on the GM team for that year's IAP tenday LARP. Now, that game traditionally takes place the weekend after Hunt, so as not to conflict. However, it's generally practiced that the weekend before (that is, Hunt weekend) is prod weekend for the GM team. Which really did not do any favors for Hunt when the rest of my GM team decided to fuck off most of that weekend and Hunt while I stayed in the Guild office attempting to debug broken LaTeX and print off thousands of sheets of paper (they showed up maybe for an hour or so every few hours).

Really, it wasn't until 2010 that Link and Yarmond, two of my housemates, dragged me to Hunt with their team, which is rather misidentified as the Tetazoo-Putz team with ever-changing names (it might have once been mostly Tetazoo and Putz people, but that time has long since passed). And it's thanks to them that I discovered that I really liked Hunt and I really liked that team. (I guess the Hunt memory from that time is neboat introducing me to Harney & Sons tea, whereby he created a monster.)

2011 was the Videogame Hunt. Memories from that include:

- a friend dragging me from one classroom to another to stare at a blackboard with the current metas on them, me taking one look at what was written up there, and saying "those are the hierarchies of angels" and everyone working on that meta turning around to stare at me. "What's missing?" "...Throne. Or Ophanim, but they're probably using Throne and it fits the letters..."

- sitting in a room full of CS people and playing this tetris-esque puzzle (it was called N-tris) with bizarre shapes and only in black-and-white, and being the first person to identify the puzzle as a QR code. (To be fair, I'd been reading up on the properties and uses of QR codes three weeks prior for an entirely different reason.)

2012 was the Producers Hunt, and I was once again writing the IAP tenday. So I only managed to stop by or log in to our team spreadsheets once or twice and noodle around with maybe a puzzle or two, but not anything spectacular.

2013 I remember being very long. :) Also permanently searing the opening of Atlas Shrugged into my brain. And someone reading the very last page when we found the Coin. There was also the puzzle where one girl ended up being a human Enigma machine because we had one physical one made from paper (that was the puzzle) and was operating that thing to decode the damn puzzle for like 2 hours. There was also a "[nos], can you help us identify these?" and showing me random anime characters. Which was a hilarious bit of deja vu.

And then there's this year, which I'm pretty sure generated a lot of Hunt memories:- 8:30am on Saturday: "[nos], can you go be the Caterpillar?" "...can I finish my coffee?" "Just take it with you." Which is how I ended up holding a rolled up piece of paper as a fake cigarette and a cup of coffee in one hand as I play the Caterpillar for a team.

Me: "Yeah, so I got here through this small hole. You can use it, if you're small enough."Team: "How do we do that?"Me: "I hear there are these potions around here that can do something like that. I wouldn't know. Not exactly my drug of choice."Team: "Yeah, I see you've got the breakfast of champions there." *gesturing to my coffee and fake cig"

-Standing in the dark lecture hall, behind the stage, acting as the 10-foot tall inflated T-Rex with wings that was our Jabberwock, and getting into a discussion with IIF (I think) about why I have claws that catch and jaws that bite if I wasn't dangerous. "Have you seen the fruit that comes off the Tumtum tree?"

-More Jabberwock. The Providence Transplantations coming in, running with the Vorpal Sword, and me yelling my lines of "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop!" and someone from the team deadpanning "Hi, [nos]."

-The team What Does Star Fox Say?! deciding, upon hearing that the Jabberwock is totally friendly and just wants to hide from the Beast too, to give it a group hug. And so 10 people group hugged an inflatable dinosaur.

-Having to play Tweedledee as suffering from some mental illness as Tweedledum was played by a propeller beanie and men's shirt draped over my right hand as an improvised puppet that didn't really "speak" to anyone but me. Because the message that HQ needed to send out a Tweedledum to me somehow got lost and the team I needed to do this for was right there. At least they found it funny.

-Cards Against Wonderland. Just...Cards Against Wonderland.

Okay, wow, this post got away from me. I guess I have a lot of feelings about Mystery Hunt.

It kinda got away from me! I apparently can ramble about ridiculous Hunt memories for awhile. (Seriously, finding the right team makes or breaks the experience. But that's like finding people you can work with well in any sort of high stress, close quarters situation.)

(Oh god, the drama thing. One day, I might talk about my sophomore year of college. It was...really not good. I'm really surprised I still have people who are friends with me from that time, because I was very angry and bitter and quite a bit of an asshole, and there was drama from other people and passive-aggressiveness and I...did not handle it well. There was a dorm meeting where I essentially declared "fuck you all, I'm out" to the entire room.

That is lucky! I make do with friends who roll their eyes and shove food into my hands with the exasperated air of "you are such a dumbass but for some reason, I am compelled to make sure you don't die". (Like last weekend...)

It gets embarrassing when you regularly have to rely on an undergrad labmate to make sure you actually remember to eat more than one meal a day. :)